It seems that a lot of people are excited about the concept of KDE
integration (and of course integration beyond that), and I am thinking
that we should start to think now a little bit about the load on the
webservers and how to manage it.
My thought is that a well behaved application should produce no more
load than people surfing our site with a traditional browser. But it is
possible (likely, even) that some applications will not be well-behaved.
If we have a single generic interface where everyone pulls in exactly
the same way, then we have no way to block abusive applications without
blocking everyone.
Something as simple as requiring a "user agent" string might be enough?
This issue is quite similar to the issue of people pulling pages from
our site "live" to make a mirror. It's not a good thing to do if done
abusively. But with web hosts, it is easy enough to simply block them
if they misbehave. A misbehaving application will come in through many
ip numbers.
I have been thinking a little bit as well about a model with full blown
keys (like the Google API) -- the point could be that for free software,
we can give out free keys and support those users at our own expense.
But for proprietary software, we can charge money for the keys.
Anyone who doesn't want to pay can still get the database dumps from
time to time.
--Jimbo